Brent Kearney

The Singularity Hub has published an article on professor Kevin Warwick, famous for his pioneering research in cybernetics, where he uses himself as a subject. In the video below, he describes some of his research projects, and discusses why transhumanism — the integration of technology and human biology — is such an exciting and important prospect.

[source: Silicon.com via Singularity Hub]

Kevin Kelly recently gave a TED Talk on “technology’s epic story”, the first 7 minutes of which I think provides an excellent description of the nature of humanity as the technological species. On Kelly’s account, humanity itself is a concept of our own invention, which we continue to develop as part of an overall technological ecology that he calls “The Technium”.

Although I love Kelly’s idea of The Technium and it being an extension of (our) life, and even the defining feature of our condition, I disagree with his teleological interpretation of technology in general having it’s own wants. After we develop some real independently thinking technology, then it will have intention, but up until now — sorry, not so.

My hopes for technology in the near to long term future are probably on the extreme end of the scale, when compared with average views of where technology is going. For example, I think that many of Ray Kurzweil’s predictions on the merging of technology with our own biology will probably come to pass, and I look forward to it. However, fantasizing about The Technium’s intentions, treating it like some sort of ephemeral galactic life force, is akin to worshiping gadgets.

After his story of technology as an extension of humanity, Kelly’s talk is at best confusing and at worst incoherent. For example, he defines technology as a human invention, and then goes on to describe it as predating humanity by billions of years.

My working definition of technology is anything useful that a human mind makes (7:17)… the origins and roots of technology go back to the Big Bang (7:37).

Kelly makes some very loose connections between energy, information, entropy and order, and somehow draws conclusions in cosmology and biology from it. This involves some dubious claims about the “energy density” in life being greater than that of a star, and that of a microchip being greater than everything else in the universe.

I’m not sure how this is calculated, but I suspect that if my Mac used as much energy per gram as the Sun outputs, my power bill would be more than the power bill of the entire planet combined.

Even if we accepted the numbers about the flow of energy per gram per second through stars vs microchips, what can we conclude from it? Kelly sees a general trend, placing our technology into a “7th Kingdom of Life”, which is evolving from entropy into greater order, and has been doing so independently of us from the beginning of time.

While we can all agree that technology is progressing, I prefer the simpler explanation that it is progressing from and due to human effort alone, and not a mysterious, cosmological-scale life force. In any case, Kevin Kelly’s talk is thought provoking, and well worth your next 17 minutes!

Technology news has been abuzz for the past couple of days, following Google’s dramatic announcement that it will no longer comply with the Chinese government’s demands to censor their citizen’s web searches, and if necessary, will leave China altogether. In other words, Google is leaving China. The decision follows the discovery that Google’s e-mail servers were subject to a sophisticated security break-in that appears to have been carried out by the Chinese government. The primary target of the attack was the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

The confrontational announcement was posted on Google’s Blog at the end of the day, Jan 12th. By the morning, their stock had dipped 2%, but its already on the rebound.

There are 300 million Internet users in China, and three quarters of their population is not yet online. A sizable market indeed. However, as Businessweek points out, Google China was set to make only $600 million in 2010, a fraction of Google’s overall $26 billion yearly revenue. The loss is not a big one, and they reap the benefits of increased “brand equity” as Internet users everywhere revel in Google’s famous corporate motto, Don’t be Evil.

How this so-called brand equity will translate into real dollars is impossible to predict. Nevertheless, I’m sure that it was part of Google’s calculation. Many observers in the IT industry are predicting that cloud computing is positioning to become a de-facto standard for both personal and enterprise IT in the coming years. Google is probably the biggest player in cloud computing.

If I were an IT manager who is considering moving services into the cloud instead of upgrading in-house servers, which I am — even though I know that Google’s leaving China may be financially justifiable — the fact that they seem to take their security and their founding principles seriously enough to make such a bold move stands out. It makes them seem more trustworthy. Some people are even calling them heroic.

Can any amount of marketing achieve that kind of respect for a company?

In the end, decisions to move enterprise IT services to the cloud will be made by people, and Google’s China move has earned them a lot of credibility. Hearts & minds, as they say.

Last year I wrote about Plasma Arc Waste Disposal, which converts waste to energy for large cities. I asked Plasco whether they plan on scaling down the technology to handle smaller municipalities, and as I recall, their reply was essentially: not for awhile.

At least one company has developed technology to convert garbage to energy on a smaller scale. IST Energy’s Green Energy Machine (GEM) is an affordable trash-to-energy conversion system suitable for operations such as office complexes, hotels, malls, restaurants, college/university campuses.

Priced at $850,000 USD, GEM converts up to 3 tons per day of consumer and industrial trash — paper, wood, plastic, food, agricultural waste — into usable electric energy. According to the company, the GEM system uses only 10% of the energy that it produces. It generates 40 kWe of electricity and 187 kWth of heat per day.

Aside from the huge benefit of waste elimination, the heat and energy production could dramatically reduce energy bills, especially in cold environments like Canada. According to the company, these cost reductions should pay for the initial investment in 3 to 4 years.

Although the GEM system does emit CO2, when compared to traditional landfill waste disposal, there is a large net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. With new, more aggressive CO2 reductions targets for many governments, this technology could be an easy fix to reduce some of the pressure they face.

The technological singularity is a point in time when a self-aware artificial intelligence (AI) recursively increases its own intelligence, leading to an “intelligence explosion” of unimaginable scale. Some people consider this project to be the fastest way, perhaps even the only way, for us to solve our most serious problems. As a species, we may not be smart enough to solve the big problems of the human condition, such as war, psychopathy, environmental sustainability, etc., so the idea is to create “super intelligences” that will show us how to fix the potentially civilization-destroying problems we face.

Much of the thinking and effort into strong AI development concerns the obvious risk of the project — how do we ensure that the resulting super-intelligence will be friendly? Or, as Johnathan Goldstein puts it in his interview with AI and robotics researcher Professor Noel Sharkey:

… twenty years from now, you think it’s more likely that a robot will be changing my bedpans than chasing me down the street, with lasers coming out of it’s eyes?

Dr. Sharkey thought that the latter scenario would be very unlikely.

There is another aspect of this super intelligence project that seems to get little mention, at least in the popular literature: what will it be like for them? Will the AIs be able to communicate with us, or for them, would it be like trying to explain calculus to a pigeon? How long will they try before giving up, if indeed at all?

That idea is artfully expressed in the following little piece of creative genius. It is from one of my favorite podcasts, CBC’s Wiretap, with Jonathan Goldstein. This is from the November 21st episode, The Answering Machine, where Goldstein played a reading of “Spirals”, a short story from David Eagleman:

I highly recommend that you listen to the whole episode, which includes the interview with Professor Sharkey and other humourous AI-related material. You can get it here, or in iTunes.

I’ll be attending the Humanity+ Summit next weekend, where one of the leading proponents of strong AI, Ben Goertzel, is speaking. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to ask him about how communication with a super-intelligence will be possible, given the gap.